Many times, games subvert our expectations about what a game is supposed to be. First-person shooters are often regarded as toxic, rage-inducing environments, and yet, players keep coming back match after match. Self-aware titles like Undertale and The Stanley Parable blur the edges of the playable experience and make the media itself a part of the game. Today, I want to talk about another genre that subverts our expectations: idle games.
Most games reward player interaction, skill, or engagement with progression and rewards; idle games, on the other hand, incentivize the player to avoid playing the game. In Cookie Clicker, after spending your most recent haul on an arbitrarily expensive upgrade or purchasing a few extra cookie factories, there isn’t really much left for you to do. You’re cookie generators will continue to churn without any player input, but it will be several hours or even days before you can afford another upgrade.
So, what do you do? Close the tab and go back to your daily life. Come back tomorrow to check on your cookies.
This idea of coming back later (or perhaps idling) is integral to the idle game loop. In Tiny Tower, you can close the app once you’ve restocked all your shops; in Clicker Heroes, you can leave once your damage is high enough to start clearing enemies quickly without the need for manual clicking. And, the more you play, the more you idle.
The amount of player interaction required in an idle game is usually inversely proportional to the amount of time the player has put into the game. At the start, the automation mechanics that enable idling are often locked behind some required player interaction. In Cookie Clicker, you need to manually generate a few cookies to buy your first clicker that passively generates cookies for you, and the game gradually decreases player involvement over time. It starts with a bit of automation and some manual input, and gradually the automation takes over, until playing the game amounts to logging in, setting up the next round of idling, and then going about your day.
Idle games are designed to push us away; ever-extending periods elapse where no meaningful interaction is possible, and yet we keep coming back for those few minutes of actual gameplay a day. Why?
For idle games that notify you to come back, I think they work a lot like social media apps. Where social media grabs users’ attention with notifications about likes and comments, idle gamers get their moment of excitement when the phone tells them their automations have stopped or that a random event has occurred. Since players don’t know when this notification will arrive, they are left in anticipation until it comes. When it does, it’s exciting; it’s a small moment in the hours of nothingness where you can finally do something in the game. The cost of these little moments of excitement is low because the dull idling occurs in the background, so most of the effort involved in achieving these little hits is the initial effort required to download the app.
For idle games that don’t notify you to come back, these turn time into a slot machine. While the app is closed or the tab is minimized, the player doesn’t know whether there is something for them to do in the game yet. Every now and again, they might check their game to see if anything has happened. At the start, when the idling periods are short, it isn’t long before there’s something to do. However, as those periods get longer, it becomes more likely that the player checks the app only to find that nothing has changed. The upgrades are still too expensive, and the rewards from the manual clicks are virtually worthless compared to the slowly accruing points from the automated mechanics. So the player checks again, and again, and again, until suddenly that expensive upgrade isn’t grayed out anymore. The payoff of buying the next upgrade is huge! But, then it’s back to waiting. These variable rewards are a key aspect of the addictive design of slot machines.
Despite initially subverting my expectations about what makes an engaging game, I think that idle games are more addictive than fun. They may not pay out monetary rewards, but they pay a sort of uneven annuity of attention. In exchange for downloading the app and spending a few minutes setting up the game, the app will drip-feed you little moments of excitement at unexpected times throughout your day. I think that dynamic is what keeps players coming back.
